just enough to make Melody look completely different from any of the other girls he’d seen so far. It was hard to look different from everybody else when everyone wore a uniform, but Melody had pulled it off. Suddenly he realized he was staring at her, and she knew he was staring at her, and he mentally scrambled to remember what she’d just said. “They were gross,” he agreed, feeling a flush rising in his cheeks. “They’d never show us anything like that in public school.”
“Lucky you,” Melody sighed. “I’ve been stuck here since ninth grade. And my parents aren’t even very religious. They just think this is safer than public school. Want to go get lunch?”
As Melody started down the corridor in exactly the opposite direction Ryan would have gone, he fell in beside her. “What about that guy Kip? Kip Adamson?”
Melody stopped short and looked at Ryan. “What do you know about him?”
“Not much,” Ryan replied. “Even though everyone in my dorm is talking about him, nobody knows what happened. And I’m in his room.”
Melody’s face paled. “I don’t think I could do that,” she breathed. “I mean, how could you even sleep?”
“I almost didn’t,” Ryan admitted. “So, did you know him?”
Melody started down the hallway again. “Not really,” she began. “I mean, I sort of thought I knew him until he started getting weird. It was like he turned into some kind of lost soul. You know what I mean?”
Ryan nodded, even though he wasn’t sure he did know what she meant, and once more fell in beside her. “So what happened to him?”
“I don’t know, and I think I must have asked everybody in school,” Melody replied, her voice hollow. “In fact, my roommate’s getting really tired of me talking about him all the time.”
Ryan offered her a lopsided grin. “So talk to me about him. I promise I won’t get tired of hearing you.”
Melody flushed slightly, but didn’t turn away. “At first I thought he’d just left school, like Jeffrey Holmes.”
Now it was Ryan who stopped short. “Jeffrey Holmes?” he repeated. “Who’s he?”
“A guy who left in November. But he wasn’t like Kip. He hated it here, and after Thanksgiving he never came back.” Her eyes clouded, and Ryan wondered exactly what it was she was remembering, but the moment passed before he could ask. “Anyway, we all thought that was what happened to Kip, too. We all figured he’d just taken off. Even Clay thought so.”
They walked along in silence for a moment, and suddenly Ryan found himself asking Melody the same question he’d asked Clay late last night. “Did you hear anything last night? Like around midnight?”
Melody glanced at him. “Hear what?”
Ryan hesitated, but then blurted it out. “A scream.” He waited for her to laugh, but she didn’t.
Instead, she rolled her eyes. “That’s just a stupid stunt,” she said. “Someone does it to every new student. They sneak far enough away from the dorm so they can barely be heard, then scream. The new person wants to know what it is, and is told that we have ghosts. Dumb, hunh?” Ryan nodded, glad he’d asked Melody instead of giving Clay and his friends an opportunity to elaborate on the joke at lunchtime. But then Melody’s expression turned serious. “But the weird thing is,” she went on, “every now and then you hear something like that and there aren’t any new students. And some of these buildings are hundreds of years old, and there are all kinds of stories about what they used to be used for.”
The images from the Inquisition lecture immediately rose out of Ryan’s memory.
Melody laughed. “There’s also supposed to be the ghost of some old nun that wanders around the school at night.”
“Have you ever seen it?”
Melody shook her head. “Of course not! Nobody I know has actually seen it themselves — everyone just knows someone who knows someone who saw it. Personally, I don’t think it’s a ghost at all. I think it’s Sister Mary David — God knows she’s old enough that she
“Or Kip,” Ryan added softly.
Melody looked up at him, and he had the uncanny feeling he could fall right into the depths of her blue eyes. She nodded slowly. “Or Kip,” she agreed. “Who really knows what happened to either one of them?”
CHAPTER 21
DETECTIVE PATRICK NORTH strode down the long, sterile hallway, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He’d spent plenty of time in both the morgue and the medical examiner’s office over the years, but he’d never quite become inured to the aura of death — unnatural death — that hung over the place.
Today, though, he had a mystery on his hands, and if he was going to solve it, he had to start here.
He stopped in front of a nondescript door with an engraved brown Formica plaque with lettering every bit as nondescript as the material upon which it was printed:
BENJAMIN BREEN, M.D.
DISTRICT MEDICAL EXAMINER
The door was ajar, and North heard a low monologue from inside. He tapped lightly on the door, then pushed the door all the way open and walked in.
Ben Breen’s office barely contained the man, not to mention the stacks of paper, the overfull bookcase, the boxes filled with evidence envelopes, and all the detritus that littered the desk, and had spilled over onto the floor. Even the two plastic chairs that were ostensibly there for visitors had been pressed into service to help support the Medical Examiner’s vast collection of cases, reference material, coffee mugs, snack wrappers, and just plain junk. Breen also had a penchant for medical oddities and dark jokes: a skull served as his penholder and a dusty skeleton hung in one corner with a small teddy bear inside its chest. North had never asked the significance of the teddy bear, and never would.
Breen clicked off his recorder and frowned as he tried to place the face before him, but his mind was on the report he’d been dictating.
“Patrick North,” the detective sighed, resigning himself to having to introduce himself to Breen yet again. You’d think after ten years the man could at least remember his name. “Detective?” Breen still looked faintly puzzled, so North offered him another piece. “The Kip Adamson case?”
Breen brightened. “Ah, yes,” he said, pulling himself up to his full six-foot-five-inch height, and then beginning a search through a file box on top of the file cabinet. “Thanks for coming down.”
“No problem,” North said, wondering if the M.E. was even going to be able to find the report. “Thanks for calling.”
“Here it is,” Breen said triumphantly, looking almost as surprised as North by how quickly he’d found what he was looking for. He opened the folder and sat back down at his desk. “Just move that crap onto the floor,” he said, waving vaguely at one of the chairs. “Sit yourself down.”
North set a stack of papers by the door, making a mental note to return them to the chair when he left. Apparently Breen was one of those people who lived amid chaos but knew exactly where to look for any given thing.
Breen flipped through several pages of typewritten notes and lab reports, then found the page he wanted. “Here it is,” he said. “Tox screen was negative.” He peered up at North. “No drugs, no alcohol. Death by close- range gunshot to the head.” He handed North a sheet of paper.
“No drugs?” North pressed. It hardly seemed possible. He glanced at the copy of the official coroner’s report, but didn’t take the time to try to sort out all the technical language. “Did you test for all the new designer drugs? Is there something you could have missed?” Breen’s left eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch, a sure sign that he was not pleased at having his judgment questioned. “I mean, the thing is that this kid’s behavior was just so totally out of character. He’d gotten in trouble a couple of times, but as far as I can tell he was never violent. So unless he’d started using drugs, nothing makes sense at all. Can you run those tests again?”
Breen dropped the file to the desktop, folded his hands on top of it, and looked directly at Detective North.
